


If You're Drowning (Swim Down)

by ryyves



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Episode 75, Gen, Multi, Suicidal Thoughts, because suicide runs through the whole thing, please be careful if you read this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:29:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22866367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: Sammy keeps driving.The way I imagined 75 would have happened before I listened to 75, set after 75.
Relationships: Ben Arnold & Sammy Stevens
Comments: 7
Kudos: 52





	If You're Drowning (Swim Down)

Sammy keeps driving. He takes Route 72 west toward California, down the long, straight border of Tennessee. As he drives, the mountains level out into rolling foothills, lush with spring leaves, getting ready for the heaviness of summer. Above, the sky is storm-dark, and in the side mirrors, he can see the storm still over King Falls. Lightning reflects off the mirrors, rolling in waves deep inside the clouds. His hands clench around the wheel.

The storm follows him, but the rainbow lights are gone. The highway is a long, flat, two-lane affair, and Sammy goes ten or fifteen miles above the limit, barely slowing on the turns. The car shudders around him at the speed. He wants the wind to go through his heart, to wipe everything clean, to take _Sammy Stevens_ out of him and leave him with nothing, but his chest is tight and dark and it’s hard to breathe.

He doesn’t look out his rearview, while the town fades to specks among the trees, to telephone wires and traffic lights and gutted grey strips of road zigzagging up and down the mountain. It isn’t his town, and he’s already said his goodbyes.

In the rumbling silence of the car, he can feel the empty on his skin, under his t-shirt. The sun will not consider rising for hours, four or five, and above there is no moon, no stars, just the white glare of lightning.

All around him, metal and glass. This wasn’t the plan, all the empty space in the passenger seat, the air empty in his lungs. He is destined to always have a hand on the one-way glass, to watch it fog up in front of him and never to see. But he swears, he swears, he felt a hand on the other side, reaching back. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was warm, as long as it was there.

And Sammy left him there. He wasn’t strong enough to pull himself out of the arms of his would-be savior to go home, to bring himself to Jack if he couldn’t bring Jack home in the last way he could.

The phone on the passenger seat keeps ringing, blaring and insistent. It’s Ben, of course, redialing seconds after ending every voicemail, standing on the podium in the high school auditorium with a tremor in his voice and his radio personality shattered. Despite his speed, Sammy reaches over and pulls the phone into his lap. He puts it on silent and then, because he does not want to look at Ben Arnold’s name flashing blue against the storm, he turns it off.

He rolls down all four windows, and the wind reverberates deep in his ears. It wipes out Ben’s voice, the indistinct mumbling of the Doorstep, the whispers from the back of the car, from behind his ears, from inside his sleeves.

The wind pulls the breath out of him and he gasps, or maybe he was already gasping. The wind prickles his eyes, or maybe they were already stinging.

It was dark and he could feel them all around him and he wasn’t afraid anymore. There was nothing else left to do. He was so cold he could feel sweat inside his jacket and on the back of his neck, so cold his fingers were white.

On the radio, the music stops and a woman’s voice comes on, droning about the storm, and then it’s Lily’s voice, Lily saying, _What gives, Stevens? You’re that hell-bent on proving me right?_ Lily saying, _I lost him twice because of you._

“God damn it,” says Sammy, his voice rough and loud but drowned out by the wind. He slams his hand on the dial so hard a pang goes up his forearm.

When her voice goes, he’s left with himself. He’s left with Jack.

And he knows she’s right, of course. He’s running and he has nowhere to go. What can he do, drive all the way to California and unlock the house he shared with Jack with the key in his glovebox and look at all of Jack’s stuff on the walls until it kills him? Send out a goddamn resume to live another meaningless life? Pretend like none of it ever happened and he wasn’t so goddamn close and he has something to go back to?

The sky gets darker and he does not know how much longer he can take this. The blood thrums through his wrists, his jugular, his ears and temples and feet. It is terrifying, being alive.

He has to pull over once for naproxen, pills rattling in their full prescription bottle, the headache slamming against his skull until he can barely concentrate on the road. He considers it then, with Debbie’s voice deeper in his brain then the headache, saying _Jack,_ over and over, her voice superimposed over her voice, _Jack Jack Jack. JjAaCcKk._

And Jack is in the ring cold on Sammy’s finger. In the watery gasps of moon through the storm, in the bounceback of the headlights, the small diamond refracts rainbow lights across the dashboard, across his hand. It was heavier than he remembered, when he put it on in the car at the entrance to the campground, diamond swinging down in his hand like a pendulum or a dowsing rod. He almost couldn’t get it on, for the shaking in his hands.

Oh, Sammy knew, when he tucked it away in its velvet box inside the glovebox for three long years, when he left it waiting with Jack in the dark, where he would one day go running.

He keeps driving. He goes slower, now, but he has to keep going, his cheeks damp and his eyes blurry from the headache, mostly the headache. The wind is roaring and he can’t always hear it. He doesn’t look at the clock on the dashboard, but he is careful to keep the radio dial far from 660.

He finds a motel off the highway with a parking lot to the side, around back, in case anyone, thinking of following him, should be looking for his car, and he pulls into the furthest spot. He puts the pills in his jacket pocket and spins the keys around his finger.

Something in his pocket must have brushed against the power button, because the phone starts ringing in the lobby. The ringtone Sammy set for Ben long ago, maybe two years, becomes Ben’s voice, a startling and garish drone.

In the dingy room, Sammy sits it on bathroom floor. He sets the contents of his pockets on the bathtub rim: keys and naproxen, wallet and hair ties, and nothing is harmless anymore.

He opens the wallet. In one of its pockets, in front of an old Barnes & Noble gift card he never used, a piece of folded photopaper shows, in faded blue scrawl, the date _02/19/2009._ With careful fingers, he teases the worn paper out and unfolds it. They are young, before the grey streaked through Sammy's hair, Jack's letter jacket draped over Sammy's shoulders and their temples pressed together and beaming in the kitchen of the old apartment they shared with Lily. Jack holds the slipping camera, the other hand around Sammy's shoulder. One of Lily's hands has made it into the frame as well, her middle finger expertly extended.

Sammy sighs and runs his fingers down the worn paper, one last time, before he sets this, too, on the rim of the bathtub.

Then he takes the phone out of his pocket and looks at the seventeen missed calls, fourteen of which include voicemail messages, varying from ten seconds to over a minute long. They’re all going to be the same: Come back to King Falls. Live in this town you hate because it reminds you too much of the person you loved more than anyone, because he is here and he is gone; stay for me and not yourself, stay even though you were close enough to touch him and it was the only hope you had left and that’s all you’re ever going to remember about King fucking Falls.

Sammy’s breath shudders. He puts Ben’s prerecorded voice on speaker.

* * *

In the King Falls High School auditorium, the crowd has dissolved into uproar. Ben, on stage, with the microphone and the board and Emily and Troy, waves his hands to get attention, calls for calm, but his voice fades in and out. He wants to run outside and look up the mountain toward the station, to see the radio tower teetering and smoke rising from the rubble, but then people would follow him out, and he’s lost too much already.

“Everyone stay where you are,” Ben tells them. “We’re—probably—safer in here, together. Sammy said it was after the station.”

At first, even he can’t hear his voice over the tumult, can’t keep his focus among the shifting bodies. Or maybe it’s the panic, Sammy’s voice close to tears over and over as he drove toward the end of town.

Ben looks at Emily, and she mouths something. Hand cupped around his ear, he leans toward her, and she rises and shouts, “Speak louder.”

Ben nods and clears his throat.

“Ladies and—ladies and gent-gentlemen. God. I know it’s scary. Please try to remain calm. As soon as we get word, you’ll be the first to know. We’ll be safe here. You heard Sammy: the UFO isn’t going anywhere.”

Slowly, the crowd returns to their seats, but the panicked chatter doesn’t diminish. Ben has power over the whole room, yet not enough to see where Sammy is going, Sammy saying goodbye over the phone and hanging up during the tumult of the explosion, the click of the telephone so quiet Ben didn’t hear it until he heard his own voice speaking into dead air, until Sammy became nothing but dead air in the auditorium.

Voice wavering, Ben says, “I have a bad feeling—”

“No kidding!” says someone from the back.

“I have to call Sammy.”

What is a ghost but a thing that’s been left behind? Ben, speaking into his microphone while Sammy’s sits untouched on the board; Ben already speed dialing Sammy’s number, his hands shaking; Ben to whom the audience is looking for guidance.

Ben, out loud, saying, “Sammy.”

* * *

[May 1, 2018, 3:12 A.M.]

_—mmy? Oh, there’s the beep. Sammy, it’s me. Are you coming back? Something’s going on and I just want to check in on you. We all want to know how you’re doing. Don’t do anything stupid._

* * *

[May 1, 2018, 3:14 A.M.]

_Sammy? Sammy, goddamn it, call me. Where are you, where are you going? What are you going to do? God, I’m—I’m scared. For you, for—well, for you, mostly. Please. Call me back._

* * *

[May 1, 2018, 3:19 A.M.]

_You can’t just vanish off the face of the earth like this. I know you don’t want to stay, but you’re scaring the living shit out of us, man. I’m—the whole town—we want to know you’re okay. You don’t have to say everything, but damn, the worst is over, isn’t it? You’re gonna be okay. Sammy, talk to me._

* * *

Sammy turns on the bathtub faucet and wets the towel draped over the edge, and then he turns it off. The water circles into the drain, dries with a small pop. He rubs the damp cloth over his face and through his hair.

The yellow light makes his hands look haggard, turns his jeans green and the white door to primrose.

There is nowhere to go: not in the dead-end town he just left, not in this dead-end motel, not in dead-end California or anywhere in the whole dead-end world. There is nowhere to run to, and nowhere worth the running.

He caresses the spot on his left finger above where the ring sits.

* * *

“Damn you, Sammy.”

Ben paces from one side of the stage to the other, turns so sharply his shoes leave skid marks. He turns his phone up to full volume, knowing that if Sammy calls while Ben is leaving a message, it won’t get through. Knowing that Sammy won’t call back.

He looks to Emily, to Troy, eyes stinging. They are looking to him, all of them, but he is not sure how much longer he will be able to be the man they need. His voice breaks. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Keep trying,” says Emily. “Until you get through. You have to. You can’t give up on him.”

* * *

[May 1, 2018, 3:22 P.M.]

_Look, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t—I know that it was a shitty idea, holding a Don’t-Go-Sammy party on the Sammi—the anniversary._

_I mean, you’re under so much pressure and I just thought, maybe, bringing people together for you might show you that you’re… valuable. To all of us. And that we care about you._

_And I know that I’ve done so much of that on the air already, but you were gonna do it anyway, weren’t you, the thing you did with the… the thing. If I’d known… Stupid, I let you run off and now I don’t know if you’re here, in King Falls, or driving to God knows where, or… anywhere, anymore._

* * *

“I’m sorry,” Sammy says, rough and small and to no one at all. Ben’s voice fades in the air, leaves echoes, and Sammy is alone again. “I didn’t want it to end like this. Not for you.”

Ben is saying, in many more words, _I figured it out. I know what you’re doing._

Or maybe that’s just what Sammy is hearing.

* * *

Sammy thought it would be dark. He didn’t know the sound would go on and on and he would almost hear a voice he recognized better than his own on audio recordings. 

There are hands on his arms pulling him back, and he is scratching at them and howling his throat raw, and Jack is right there, he’s right there, not even a heartbeat away.

* * *

There is a house waiting with a foyer and a welcome mat and Jack’s pajamas tucked beneath the pillow on his side of the bed.

There is a house big enough for a future, for kids and a dog they would take out together or on alternating days, with a great marble kitchen island spread with tax forms and radio scripts, and every day it gets bigger and emptier. There is a window seat that Sammy sits at on Sunday mornings to read the paper while Jack makes the coffee and the sun falls on Jack’s hands. There are curtains around the bedroom windows that Jack pulls open for Sammy every morning, after kissing him.

There is a house with Jack’s college letter jacket over the bannister and Jack’s books spread out across the coffee table and Jack’s shoes beside the door, a neat row of them, and Jack’s planner sticking out of the bag Jack keeps in his car at work. There is a house that isn’t a house but a ghost. It is waiting, uninhabited. It hasn’t heard a voice in years but the rows of clothing still line the walk-in closet they shared.

A sequence of blank days led up to Sammy’s departure, a phone interview with Merv Sammy can’t remember, the process of finding suitcases that were his and not Jack’s and filling them with things that were his and not Jack’s, and then of finding more suitcases that were Jack’s and filling them, the process of sitting on the bed before the closet or in the closet and looking at all the things they had or still have and trying to decide what wouldn’t be sacrilegious to touch.

Before he left, Sammy did the laundry, washed the dishes and put them away, wiped down the counters, took the trash to the curb. Someone had to take care of the place, to make sure Jack would return to a place that was warm and bright and clean, a place, perfectly preserved, that he could still call home.

The duffle bag Jack left beside the door when he went is still half-unpacked, after three and a half years, at the foot of their bed. Sammy has had his share of blank days staring at it, too, moving it to the chair in the corner of the room so he could step around, as if by not touching it, he could will Jack to walk backwards through the door and unpack it.

In this house, there is a Jack who looks at him again, who smiles when they kiss, who chats in the car on their way to work and laughs and shows his dimples.

There are only so many oceans one man can pour out before he reaches the bottom.

* * *

[May 1, 2018, 3:24 A.M.]

_You’ve been through a lot and I get it. I would have—I mean, if I knew, for sure, that Emily was never coming back… I thought… I envisioned forever. You know that, man. You heard it in the Christmas singing tape you gave me. And I know you envisioned forever, too. Hell. How do you give up on that?_

[Distant] _Let me speak to him._

[Muffled; a hand held over the microphone] _Yeah, one second. Sammy, I want you to know that I’ll be there for you. However you go forward. But you have to go forward._

[Shuffling, static. Emily’s voice, sweet and soft] _Hi, Sammy. If you’ve listened to this all the way through, I’m sure you know how much we love you. We just want to know that you’re safe. Give us a chance. Give me a chance, Sammy._

_I know I wasn’t… where he is… and what I say may not hold a lot of weight, but I’m glad you’re not, either._

* * *

“I’m starting to think I should just start the car and go,” says Ben, microphone switched off on the board. His voice is thick. “Fat lot of good _calling him_ is doing. By the time he picks up, I’ll be seventy-five. He was heading out to the highway. Maybe I can catch up to him.”

“We’ll go with you. Divide and conquer,” says Troy.

“Yeah, that… that’ll be good.” Hotshot radio boy, all out of words, his throat trembling as much as his hands. Between his town and his best friend, the sky is alight with fire and he’s running out of ways to put it out.

Ben runs his hands through his hair, over his face. On shaky legs, he turns back to the gathering. “Everyone, I know you’re all worried about Sammy. Me more than anyone, maybe, but I know you all love him, so I’m going to keep trying until we get through. Emily, can you… I mean, if you’d be willing…”

“Yes?”

Compared to hers, his fear-raw voice sounds crass. “Just could you hold down the fort until I get him?”

* * *

Think of the trouble he’d be causing. Goddamn.

And he’s restless. He needs to be closer to home. Tennessee isn’t close enough, Alabama, Arkansas, the long panhandle of Oklahoma. It’s a multi-day journey, even if he drives through the nights and lives off truck-station coffee and soda and stale croissants.

He doesn’t have that sort of time.

If he pulls into some unused byroad in the middle of the night, gets out of view from the highway; if he locks the motel room doors and stays in, or parks in a ditch and hikes into the woods, he’ll be gone. Not as easy as stepping into the void, not as empty of evidence, but second-best is better than worst.

Debbie is singing _JjAaCcKk_ behind his ears. If he takes the naproxen, he won’t stop.

He takes his things off the tub.

* * *

When the call goes through, Ben’s heart freezes deep in his stomach.

Sammy’s voice is thick and scratchy, and it fills the auditorium. The chattering dies down, and in his periphery, Ben can see his audience lean closer to the stage.

“You sure know how to blow up a guy’s phone,” says Sammy.

“I’m not sorry,” says Ben, defiant. He is so full of fear he can’t move.

“Ben, I don’t want to have this conversation. Stop calling me.”

“I won’t.”

“Look out for your friends in King Falls.”

“You’re not the only one who gets to have ties outside of King Falls. If you’re going home, wherever home is if it isn’t here, then go home. But I’ve had this premonition all day, and then you in Perdition Wood…” Ben fumbles and the panic rises in his throat.

There’s a rustle, a moment of static. Indistinct, Sammy’s weary voice is saying, “I’m checking out.”

Another voice, sleepy, barely audible: “You can keep the key if you’re gonna be back.”

“I’ve paid. I’m not coming back.”

Ben is not sure whether Sammy is talking to him or to the voice, to the person presumably behind a hotel or motel counter. There is a rush of sound, as of a door opening on a windy night.

Ben says, quick, before Sammy can hang up on him, “Where are you going? Tell me you’re just going home.”

“I’m going home.”

Ben’s breath comes out in a shudder. “You have a terrible lying voice.”

“Do I, Ben Arnold?”

“Don’t _Ben Arnold_ me.”

“I’m not signing your contract, I’m going back to _my home_ in California, and frankly, Ben, while I appreciate your concern, please focus on something more important.”

“What?” Ben throws his free hand up, even though Sammy can’t see him. “What’s more important?”

“Ben, I tried.” Sammy’s voice is plaintive. “If I can’t have him, there’s nothing for me.”

The auditorium is so quiet you could hear a strand of hair hit the ground.

“There is nothing for me. I’m tired. I’m so tired. It’s not living, Ben. It’s doing what you want to make you and the people of King Falls happy, and I can’t do it. Not here, not in California, nowhere. I’m not happy.”

Ben doesn’t hear the reverb of Sammy’s voice across the auditorium. They could be sitting together in their shared office or across a booth at Rose’s; they could be staring across oceans, throwing bottles and hoping they cross the distance. Ben’s voice is a whisper. “You could be. If you just let us in—”

“I’m not, and I’ve tried.” There is nothing but darkness through the phone line. A car door clicks shut, hazy with static. When Sammy speaks, his voice is soft and absolute. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

Ben is cold all over, his chest barely able to rise for it. “That’s—that’s not a goddamn apology. If you were sorry, you would _stay._ I don’t mean—in King Falls, Sammy, please, just stay.”

An engine revs, and it echoes across the auditorium.

“You don’t understand,” says Sammy.

“I do. When Emily—”

Sammy’s voice is a snarl. “You don’t understand. Tell me, what would you have done if Emily hadn’t come back? What if there was nothing in the whole wide world you could have done?”

Ben is silent, and Sammy waits, the whole world waits, for him to answer. “I… I don’t know.”

“So until you feel that—until you know how _helpless_ that is, don’t talk to me about staying. I got out of your town and I’m gone. Let me go.”

“I won’t.”

“Let. Me. Go. I’m sorry, but I’ve tried to be kind. I’m at the end of my fucking rope and I don’t need you or anyone to tell me what to do with my life.” There is a pause, and then Sammy says, “I’m not gonna be your burden. You and King Falls. You don’t need me. You’ll be okay.”

His thumb is this close to ending the call and Ben knows it.

Ben says, “You told me once, not that long ago, that I’d grown up. That I was a better man because of what I’d triumphed over.” Talk, radio host, talk like your life depends on it. Talk like every second Sammy is on the line is another second you can guarantee his pulse. Talk because if you have to listen to him go, you don’t know what you’ll be left with. “And you were right. But it wasn’t just about my triumphs. It’s about what I endured. It’s about what I made myself out of the wreckage of my life.

“Sammy, there are people who care about you, you know I’m one of them, who would do anything to get you the help you need. Sammy, when Emily was gone, I held onto the only thing I knew how to hold onto, and that’s what I’m asking you now. Hold on to me.”

* * *

There have been too many paper mache starts in this town, too many sculptures made out of notebook paper. All the things he has built here, dissolved by the storm above him; all the things he has built, rent by his hands. He is sick of looking at the words until his head burns, of deciphering handwriting never meant to be deciphered, like a surgeon’s scrawl.

The highway unrolls before him, rain-slick and glistening. Somewhere a faultline Sammy can’t control, and beyond that a coast he can drive to and beyond that the sea.

If you’re drowning, he thinks, swim down.

* * *

Ben says, “Where are you? Look, I’m just gonna take this off the air. Tell me where you are, and I’ll be there. Which way did you go?”

He all but bolts out of the auditorium, phone pressed against his ear. Faces turn and voices rise, but all he can focus on is the panic that the sound of his breathing might keep him from hearing if the line goes dead. In the parking lot, he fumbles for his keys, drops them, and then his hand shakes so badly he can barely fit them into the ignition. He does a good ten above the speed limit as he careens out of town, turns west on Route 72.

The lightning stays over King Falls. Rain hits the windshield in heavy drops, but not enough to use the wipers more than twice. Ben can barely hear the rumble of the wheels over his erratic heart. He keeps the phone on speaker in his lap, Sammy’s face, frozen in time, staring up at him.

Ben drives for forever, past a truck stop lit up green and yellow, past a meandering eighteen-wheeler, until the mountains flatten out and all he can see is fields and sky.

“Sammy, stay on the phone with me.” Ben doesn’t know if Sammy has done anything yet. He doesn’t know if he will find Sammy alive. Ben’s panicked voice talks three times as much as Sammy’s. “Keep giving me directions. Don’t hang up.”

“There’s nowhere to give directions to,” says Sammy, and his voice is so weary. “I’m right off 72, down into the fields. I don’t think the road has a name.”

“Keep talking. I’m coming for you, Sammy.”

* * *

A voice singing _lovelovelove._

* * *

Ben pulls his car off onto the shoulder so hard he nearly slides into the field. He leaves the engine idling and the driver’s door open, barely remembering to shift into park before he is lurching toward Sammy. The headlights swaddle the dirt road bumpy with tire tracks; the sharp ditches into fields on one side and a line of trees on the other, leading back into the forest beyond; the back of Sammy’s shoulders.

At his approach, Sammy stops pacing down the road, a dozen yards from Ben, and looks back. Half of his hair is loose around his face and shoulders, damp from the patch of rain. This far from the highway, only the empty breeze stirs its strands.

“Sammy,” says Ben, and his voice breaks into a sob. Ben has been expecting hollow eyes, red cheeks, and maybe it’s the dark and Ben’s headlights shining down on him, but Sammy looks well. He looks strong. His hands are deep in his pockets, his shoulders heavy and drawn together. Sammy is a thunderstorm of a man in the headlights. Ben looks at him and overtop is an image where the road runs back into the woods and no one is standing there.

“You’re here,” says Ben, and he has to call it into the night.

Sammy says, “You were coming. I waited for you.”

“You stayed for me?”

“I didn’t say that. I said I waited.” He steps toward Ben, ungainly, straining.

“So you’re saying…?”

“I turned off the car, I’m here with nothing in my hands, see.” It is the speech of someone who has been here before, who has been thoroughly grilled and knows the reassurances to recite; it is a plea, a surrender, a bargain.

Ben steps toward him and waits to see a tremor, the movement of a startled animal, but Sammy doesn’t move. A sky this dark should be harder to move through, should be like water, should give Ben an excuse for the saliva in the back of his throat. He walks forward, his own hands empty and heavy at his sides, eyes stinging.

But Sammy keeps three yards’ distance between them, and between the storm and Sammy’s grey sweater, it feels like Ben is looking at a ghost.

It does not look like the scene of a suicide. It looks like a country road at night, muddy and raised above the surrounding fields, the forest sweeping in behind Sammy. Sammy’s hands are empty, but the fear is there all the same.

Ben cannot keep his voice level. “Sammy, I’m here. Talk to me. Talk to me, and I’ll listen.”

“You don’t listen,” says Sammy roughly.

“I will. I’m not trying to make you turn around and come back. Sammy, I love you. I want you to talk to me.”

Sammy sighs. He pulls his hair all the way down, shaking his head as he fits the hair tie over his fingers. Ben watches Sammy comb his hair back from his face, capturing outlying strands and pulling them up. His face is pale beneath the dying storm and his eyes are dark as a void.

“What do you want me to say?” says Sammy. “I’ve waited for you. I’m giving you closure. Now let me go.”

“This isn’t closure, and you know it isn’t. You think I want to live with the loss of you? Do you think I can?”

Ben has seen tumbleweed-filled Westerns with less empty space than this, mountaintops touched by less sky. His shadow falls harsh on the road between them, reaching past Sammy’s knees. Sammy’s shadow goes back into the forest. The only thing holding them together is the way the light falls.

Ben’s jacket is still half-zipped and the post-rain cold presses against him like a body, like a body bag.

“It is,” says Sammy, and his voice isn’t rational. “I don’t think you understand how much damage you’ve done.”

“Damage?” Ben splutters. “What damage? All I’m trying to do is help you.”

“Trying to save me. Inserting yourself into my business, thinking you know better than me about my own shit.”

It is all Ben can do to keep his tongue behind his teeth. “I’m not just going to leave you to figure it out on your own. You need me, and I want you to trust me.”

They are bodies whirling through space, not colliding but colliding all the same. Sammy is barely recognizable, an empty house.

“Go home.” If the doors of Sammy’s eyes were closed, now he locks the windows. His voice is so rough it is almost a scream. It is the wind where the wind stops. “Go the _fuck_ home.”

“No.” Ben’s voice shudders through him like an earthquake, threatens to tear his vocal cords.

Sammy throws his hands in the air, sudden and violent, a motion that upturns the sky. Sammy’s grimace looks like a wound. All of the Midwest could stand between them and it would be easier to cross.

“Turn your ass around, get in the car, and go. I know myself well enough to know I will say things I don’t mean to make you go. I don’t want to do that to you, but I will.”

“Really?” says Ben, reckless, with a laugh he cuts off the moment he realizes it’s his. “Because you’re my best friend, and nothing’s going to take me from your side.”

Sammy’s voice is strained. “Please, Ben. That’s not what I want to leave you with.”

“You’re not leaving me anywhere. We’re in this together.”

“We’re gonna beat around this same bush forever, huh,” says Sammy darkly.

“If we have to. But I’ll give you my forever if you’ll take it.”

“Damn it, Ben.”

“Don’t.”

Sammy’s voice is steady and not so cold anymore, not so much like there is a ghost in his bones. “Forever—it’s so easy for you. You think about it like it’s a guarantee.”

“It’s not. I’m so terrified most of the time, I can’t think.”

“It is. First with Emily, even when she was gone, and God knew where she was. The tapes, the Christmas tape, your song, and now… You see forever. You don’t take it for granted, but you _take_ it.”

Ben takes a step forward and Sammy doesn’t recoil. It is enough, to stay there and not move; it is enough to close the distance.

“I see forever, huh? You know what I see? Sammy? I see a future for you – maybe it’s here, and maybe it’s in some goddamn city a three-hour plane ride from here, a new one, New York or Philadelphia, or here, because you decided to stay, but for you, not just for me. I see myself putting photos of us up on the walls of my house. I see you spending the holidays with me for decades.” Ben takes a breath. “I see you happy, Sammy.”

Sammy runs a hand over his face. Suddenly his body is small, despite the breadth of his shoulders, despite his height. He opens his mouth, looks at Ben, looks up at the sky.

“I want to be,” whispers Sammy. Hands still in his pockets, he walks toward Ben, slowly, as though dragging his feet out of the earth with every step. “You have no idea what it means when I come into work and you look up from your phone and smile. Looking at you, I think, it is possible. But I don’t have it, and I never will. Ben.” Sammy swallows.

Maybe he is as cold as Ben is. Maybe it’s the rain, drying on his skin and clothes. Maybe fear is what makes people the same.

And it seems as though Sammy is going to turn away, is going to walk to the edge of the world and off it. Then he says, and Ben hears Sammy’s voice trembling, “Since you’re here, pass this with me.”

Stepping toward him, Ben says, “Will it pass?”

“I don’t know.”

There is an ocean of Jack in Sammy’s eyes, and between that and the raindrops, Ben could sink and drown.

Sammy passes him and sits on the hood of Ben’s car, putting his hands between his thighs. The headlights spill between Sammy’s knees, scamper down the dirt road, and the shadows of Sammy’s legs cut through the night inches from Ben’s shoulders. Above, stars fight through patches in the clouds. The metal shines, speckled with raindrops. The silence stretches out like a red carpet that neither of them are ready step onto. Ben wraps his arms around his middle.

“Do you want to die?” whispers Ben.

“I’ve been trying not to say it like that. For your sake.”

“However you say it won’t change what it is. It’s okay.” He doesn’t say, _Tell me._ He reaches out and touches Sammy’s hand. Sammy looks up at him, and then he turns his hand and grasps Ben’s like it is a lifeline. The ring presses against the undersides of Ben’s fingers, smooth and cool.

Sammy’s voice could be the breeze. “Yes.”

Ben opens his mouth and his teeth don’t let it through. “Do you… do you want to live?”

Between them lies the flicker of electricity from the distant storm, like something sleeping. Between them lies the light.

“That’s a complicated question.”

Ben’s voice is gentle when he says, “Try to answer it.”

“I want to live a life I’m not living, a life I can’t live and can’t get back.”

“And that’s the only life you’re… God, it’s not _willing_ I’m trying to say, it’s. It’s the only life worth living?”

Sammy looks at him, his face pale and open and his stubble growing in, and says, “Yes. He made living worth any of it, for the first time in… since I was a teenager, really. Jack-in-the-Box Jesus.” It’s said as an afterthought, but it’s a King Falls phrase, a Ben phrase, a thing Sammy is going to carry with him.

A thing to tell the ghosts.

“That’s a long time to wait,” says Ben.

Sammy sighs, so heavy it must come from the core of him. Suddenly it is a miracle that the car hasn’t caved beneath him, beneath the weight he carries. “It’s a long time to be alive.”

Ben backtracks. “If joking about… age is a problem, I never meant anything by it.”

“No, it’s nice.” Sammy looks at the sky, where, to the west, the clouds have begun to thin. “It’s like hearing, without you even realizing, look, you made it. You can keep making it. Another year, another day, sometimes. And it’s nice that you don’t know you’re doing that for me.”

Ben cracks a smile, the first he hasn’t forced all day. He wants to say, _Now I know._ He says, “Well, I guess you’re kind of old.”

Sammy presses his lips together, and it’s almost a smile. He looks at Ben, his eyes silver with stars. As Ben steps closer, he can see a sun in Sammy’s face, a pre-dawn lightness. Overhead, away from the mountains, the clouds tear away from the greying sky, pale to wisps before the moon.

“Do you want to live?” Ben says again.

“I was so close.” Sammy could be a thousand years old with a voice like that.

“That’s not an answer,” Ben prompts, gently.

“I’m still here, on the wrong side of him. I feel hands reaching for me, but they’re not real. They’re not his.”

“Please, Sammy.”

“There’s a part of me that wants to stay. Some days it’s all I want. I want to fight until it literally kills me, which it probably will. Most days it sits in the back of my head and tells me, see how you feel in the morning. So I wait until the morning. I wait till every goddamn morning, but then I wake up and see Jack’s face and remember that he’s gone.” Sammy reaches for Ben’s other hand. “But there are other things worth waking up for.”

Afraid to look him in the eyes, Ben says, “There are?”

Sammy takes a breath, his face raised. “Yeah. You.”

“Oh,” says Ben.

“But the station.”

“You don’t have to do the show,” says Ben.

Sammy’s voice is frantic. “No, the station. The storm, the UFO.”

“Will be there to take care of when we get back. It can wait. There are more important things. You know I’d give up the show in a heartbeat to be here with you. What was it you said? To _pass this._ Look at you, moving heaven and earth to pass this.”

Sammy’s smile is sunlight soft, even in shadow.

Ben says, “And I’ll be here to help you pass it a thousand times.”

“Then let’s pass it,” says Sammy, and as Ben stops beside the driver’s door, he sees, silhouetted against the headlights, Sammy’s face looking up at the sky, at the mountains, his empty hands star-touched before him and shaking and his lips parted to reveal teeth.


End file.
